This happens a lot with any dynamic system. When you render to the PV, Cinema first clones the entire document and then renders that. But in many cases when you render a frame, the result depends on changes made in previous frames. With a cloned document that is no longer available and the rendered result is not what you expect. When you render to the viewport, or in the real time preview, the document is not cloned so it works as expected.

To get round this, you can either render all the frames up to and including the one you want, or cache the simulation first.

There's no hard and fast rule for this. If you render a frame to the PV and it works as expected, that's fine. If it doesn't, you'll need to cache it or render a frame sequence from the start.

I am having a similar issue with the xp4_reel05_multicloth scene from the content repository.

I have cached the simulation, and particles render perfectly, but the cloth planes remain stiff as a board.

This is very confusing to be because my attempts with the XP4_Reel04_Cloth_Highres project were met with success when caching the simulation.

Hi,

the "multicloth" example is an experimental setup that is not supported by the xpCache directly. Before caching just convert the Connect Object into geometry (hit "C") and combine all elements into a single mesh. Then apply the deformer directly and you should be able to cache it correctly.

Another solution would be exporting your ClothSim as an Alembic file this way you don't need to convert the connect object in advance.